Page 72 of Edge of Ruin
Nancy’s eyes lit up. “Hell, yes, it could. In relation to the Doric mode, you bet it could. Liam, give me that CD player on the workbench.”
Liam unfolded his tall, rangy self, grabbed the player, and plugged it into the wall socket near the table. She selected the track. A haunting tune began. Men’s voices, deep and reverberant, singing in perfect unison. The sounds rose and fell in ancient patterns that sounded somehow familiar.
Nancy listened to a fragment of the piece, brow furrowed. She hit “stop” after a few moments, then let it play again. And again. And again, scribbling numbers after each time.
Around the eighth time, she held up a scrap of paper with a long sequence of numbers. “Twenty-five digits,” she announced.
“Try it,” Vivi urged.
Nancy keyed it in. They held their breath. The light flashed red. Nancy sagged. “Hell,” she said, dispirited. “I’m all out of ideas.”
“Try adding PMD for Primus Modus Doricus,” Duncan suggested.
Nancy shrugged, and punched in the numbers again. “Okay, guys. Here goes nothing. P... M ... D,” she said.
The light flashed green. The door of the safe popped open with a click.
None of us could quite believe it. We stared at the thing, almost afraid of the seam of darkness behind the crack of its opened door.
Liam touched the door gingerly with the tip of his forefinger and swung it open.
There was only one item inside. A piece of yellowed, ancient paper in a plastic sleeve. Thin and limp and tightly covered with cramped handwriting.
Nancy took it out. “It’s in Latin,” she said, passing it immediately to Nell.
Nell put on her glasses and peered at it. “This must be Marco’s treasure map,” she said, in a wondering tone. “This is a list of what look like Latin flower names, and instructions that say to move from this flower to this flower, et cetera, et cetera. At the end, it says to go down into the ground four hand spans and turn three times counterclockwise. No wonder Marco thought the treasure was in the palace gardens. The gardener at the Palazzo de Luca said that the garden had been dug up more times than he could remember.”
She laid the piece of paper down with a sigh. “Well, phooey,” she said. “We’ve exchanged one puzzle for another. And I, for one, am burnt out on puzzles.”
Liam got up. “I’ll go get dessert,” he said, sounding resigned.
Vivi got up to stretch her legs and wandered around Liam’s workshop, touching various items with her fingertip. She turned to me.
“This is all Lucia’s stuff,” she told me. “Things that Liam and Nancy were able to salvage from when John trashed her house.” She fingered a mangled thing made of glass, pebbles, plastic, and bent wire. “This is one of mine. The Three Sisters. I think Lucia meant for me to think of it so it would occur to me to put the pendants together.” She petted the twisted knot of materials and wire. “I’m going to restore this. In memory of her.”
“Excellent idea. Liam’s doing that with Lucia’s intaglio table, too,” Nell said. She laid her hand against the plane of a beautiful carved oak table that lay on the workbench. It was cloven in two splintered pieces.
“This is the famous table Duncan told me about?” I asked Vivi. “The one from the Renaissance that had the hidden drawer?”
“Yeah.” Vivi traced some brutal scratches on the surface with her fingertip. “These marks were carved on it by the SS men, during the Nazi Occupation. The men who served under Colonel Haupt, Sr.”
I leaned down to take a closer look. “Amazing detail,” I said. “I can tell in a glance what all these plants are. Common wildflowers, and whoever carved these spent hours looking at them. Look. Centaurea scabiosa. Here’s Achillea millefolium, and Linaria vulgaris, and Senecio jacobea?—”
“What did you say?” Nell demanded.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry about that. I meant, knapweed, yarrow, toadflax, and ragwort. And this one here is?—”
“No, not that! Repeat what you said in Latin!”
“Oh.” I was taken aback by the sharp, almost frightened look on her face. “Ah, let’s see.” I glanced down at the table for reference. “I just said Centaurea scabiosa, Senecio jacobea?—”
“They’re in it! They’re in Marco’s map!” She turned toward the door. “Duncan! Liam, Nancy! Get in here!” She collected the map in its plastic sleeve. Liam, Duncan, Nancy, and Vivi gathered around the splintered table, wide-eyed and breathlessly silent.
“The first one on the map is Senecio jacobea,” she said. “Ragwort, did you say?”
She waited for my nod. “It says to go from there to the nearest Knautia arvensis. Do you see that?”
I studied the table for a moment, and pointed. “Right here,” I said. “That’s scabious, in English. There are others, but this is the closest one.”
